Vowel Sweeper

What Vowel Sweeper actually is

The game's own one-line description is "a daily word minesweeper where every vowel is a mine", and the Perfect Sharp hub that publishes it says the same thing with the crossword made explicit: "Minesweeper on a crossword grid, where every vowel is a mine". Both halves of that sentence carry weight, and a lot of the difficulty in the game comes from players reading only one of them.

The board is five squares by five. Some of those squares are blocked, exactly like the black squares in a crossword. Any run of five squares across or down that is not interrupted by a blocked square is an English word. At the start most of the letters are hidden and a handful are already open, which is what the game's own tutorial shows in its second step. From there you uncover consonants, flag vowels, and try to finish the grid without detonating anything.

What separates it from minesweeper is that the numbers are not the only information on the board. In minesweeper a number tells you about mines and nothing else, and the puzzle is a pure counting exercise. Here the numbers tell you where the vowels sit, and the letters tell you which word belongs on each line, and neither source is usually enough on its own. The game's tutorial says this outright in its final tip: the key is to make deductions using both the letters and the numbers. That sentence is the whole game.

It is made by Unseen Forms Limited, the small studio behind a handful of daily puzzles collected at Perfect Sharp, including Twixtle and Spelling Garden. Playing the daily board is free. A paid membership called PerfectSharp+ adds a second, harder board each day, the full archive, and your history across devices.

How a turn works

There are only three things you can do to a square, and the game states them in one line under the board: tap to flag, double tap to flip, hold to place the exact vowel. That is the entire interface. Everything else on the screen is bookkeeping.

Tap to flag

A single tap plants a flag, which is your claim that the square holds a vowel. Flagging is free and completely reversible: tap again and the flag comes off. You can flag a square you are only fairly sure about, look at what the flags do to the neighbouring numbers, and take the flag back if the arithmetic turns against it. Nothing is scored on flags and nothing is checked at the end, so this is the one part of the board where you can afford to be wrong out loud.

Double tap to flip

Two taps open a square. If it holds a consonant, you get the letter and a number. If it holds a vowel, the game is over. The two taps exist because opening is the one move you cannot undo, and the tutorial says so directly: "Opening takes two taps because it is the one move you cannot undo." The delay is there to stop a stray tap from ending a run, which tells you something about how often that happens.

Hold to place the exact vowel

Holding a square opens a small wheel of the five vowels so you can name the one you think is underneath; if the square was not flagged yet, naming a vowel plants the flag for you. This changes nothing about the puzzle. It is a note to yourself, useful on boards where two vowels are competing for the same square and you want to keep track of which theory you are working on. Nothing in the scoring or the win condition depends on the name being right.

What a flag does to the board

A flagged square cannot be opened. That is a small rule with a large consequence. If you flag a square that is actually a consonant, the square is now a wall: you cannot open it, so you cannot reveal the last consonant, so you cannot win until you notice and take the flag off. The game will not tell you the flag is wrong, because flags are never checked. So a flag is a promise you are making to yourself, and the cost of a wrong one is that you have to remember you made it.

This is why good players flag in two passes. The first pass plants flags the numbers actually force. The second pass plants the speculative ones, usually while naming the vowel, so that a later glance at the board separates the arithmetic from the hunch.

What the number means

Every opened consonant shows a digit. The official tutorial explains it in one sentence: "The number tells you how many vowels are surrounding the letter." Surrounding means all eight squares around it, diagonals included, which is the same neighbourhood minesweeper has always used. The game's own counting routine walks those eight squares and nothing else.

Two consequences follow immediately, and both of them catch people out.

The first is that blocked squares are not letters and never count. They are holes in the grid, so a square sitting next to a blocked square has fewer neighbours than one in open board. A number of three in the middle of the board is one of eight. A number of three in a corner is three of three, which is a completely solved square. The same digit means different things depending on where it sits, and the blocked squares are what create that difference.

The second is that the digit counts vowels, not hidden squares. A five does not mean five unrevealed squares around it. It means five of its neighbours are vowels, and a square can show a five while most of the board is still face down. Reading a number as "hidden squares remaining" is the single most common way to misread a board.

Y is a consonant here

The game's vowel set is A, E, I, O and U. Y is not in it, so a square holding Y is a consonant, it carries a number, and it can be opened without risk. That makes Y-words unusually valuable. RHYTHM, NYMPHS, GLYPH and MYTH all contain no vowel at all by this game's definition, which means a line made of those letters is a line with nothing to blow up. On a board where every vowel is a liability, a five-letter word with no vowels in it is the safest thing you will ever find.

Zero is the best number on the board

A zero says every one of its neighbours is a consonant. That is up to eight squares proved safe by one number, and it is the largest single deduction the numbers can give you. Zeros are also the reason to open early in the middle of the board: a zero in the centre clears eight squares, while a zero in a corner clears three.

The reverse is just as strong. If a square has eight neighbours and shows an eight, every neighbour is a vowel. That happens rarely, but the same arithmetic applies at smaller numbers, and it is the whole of the counting half of the game.

The other half: every line is a word

Strip the numbers away and what is left is a five-by-five crossword with no clues. Every unblocked row and every unblocked column is a five-letter English word, and that is a hard constraint you can search against. The tutorial leans on it in its longest step: a C shows three surrounding vowels, only one of them is known, and the game tells you to look at the word instead. "The only word that would fit is KICKS."

That example is worth sitting with, because it is the moment the game stops being minesweeper. The number on the C cannot be resolved by counting: three vowels around it, one flagged, so two of its remaining neighbours are vowels and you have no way to say which two. The word resolves it. KICKS puts a vowel at position two and nothing else, so the vowels are forced by the spelling rather than by the arithmetic. Once you know the word, the flags fall into place, and once the flags fall into place the neighbouring numbers resolve, and the board opens up.

This is why the two halves have to be worked together. Numbers alone stall on squares where too many neighbours are unknown. Words alone stall on squares where too many letters are unknown. The intersection of the two is almost always enough to move.

Blocked squares change the word arithmetic

A line containing a blocked square is not a word, so it is not a constraint and you should not spend a second trying to make it one. A board with four blocked squares in a checker pattern leaves three rows and three columns as real words, six constraints in total; a board with fewer blocked squares leaves more. Each line you half-fill sharpens the others. The blocked squares also shorten the neighbour lists of the squares beside them, which makes those numbers more decisive than their face value suggests.

Winning, losing, and what a run costs

You win by revealing every consonant on the board. The game's final tutorial step puts it plainly: "Reveal every consonant to solve the puzzle." Nothing else is required. You do not have to flag the vowels, you do not have to name them, and you do not have to fill in the blocked squares. Every consonant open and the board is done.

You lose by opening a vowel. The square turns, the board detonates the rest of the vowels in a chain, and the day is finished with a message that says you hit a vowel. There is no partial credit for a lost board in the record, and a loss ends your streak: the launch notes say "Hitting a vowel ends a streak."

So the shape of a run is asymmetric. Opening a consonant is always safe and always progress. Opening a vowel is total loss. That asymmetry is the reason the game rewards patience far more than speed in the middle of a board, even though speed is what the score measures at the end.

Daily, archive, and the unlimited question

People reach this page after typing "vowel sweeper unlimited" or "vowel sweeper infinite", so it is worth being direct about what exists.

What the game ships

There is one puzzle a day. The launch notes are explicit: "One puzzle a day. Everybody gets the same board, and it changes at your own midnight." Everyone playing on a given day is looking at the same grid, which is what makes the shared scores and the weekly leagues meaningful.

There is an archive. The game labels it "Archive puzzles" with the line "Play a day you missed", and the launch notes list an archive of past days as one of the features that shipped on day one.

There is a second, harder board each day called Daily Hard. It is part of the paid membership: the notes describe it as "Daily Hard: a second, harder board every day", and the Perfect Sharp hub lists Daily Hard for Vowel Sweeper as members only. The same membership unlocks the whole archive and your history on every device.

There is no unlimited mode

As of this writing the game has no endless, unlimited or infinite mode. That is not a guess. The game page offers Daily and Daily Hard. The Perfect Sharp hub lists exactly those two for Vowel Sweeper. The launch notes describe one puzzle a day, an archive of past days, and Daily Hard, and mention nothing resembling an endless board. If a search engine brought you here looking for a mode where you can keep playing board after board, the honest answer is that the game does not currently have one, and no amount of searching will produce it.

What people usually want when they search for it is one of three things, and all three have an answer.

• More boards today. The archive is the closest thing the game offers. It is a list of past days you can play, and the paid tier is what unlocks all of it.
• A harder board. Daily Hard is the second daily grid and it is a harder one. It is not unlimited, but it is a second puzzle on the same day.
• Practice without spending the day's board. This is the one this page can actually help with. The solver below lets you take any board, including one you have already finished or one you lost, and study what the deductions were. Set up the position, run it, and read the reasons. That is a practice loop the game itself does not provide, and it does not touch your streak.

Why "unlimited" is such a common search

Many daily word games have picked up an unlimited variant somewhere, usually a fan-made clone or a browser version with the date removed, so the phrase has become a habit. Vowel Sweeper is young, launched in August 2026, and we found no unlimited clone of it. If an unofficial endless version appears, it will not be from the studio, and the rules it uses may not match the ones described on this page. Treat any unlimited clone as a different game until you have checked its vowel set and its neighbour rule.

How the scoring works

Only solved boards are scored, and the score is built from three things: "Solved boards are scored on speed, the day's median time, and any clues taken." The scorecard breaks the total into those lines and you can tap a line to see the working, which is unusually generous for a daily puzzle and worth doing once if you care about the number.

Speed is measured against the day's median rather than a fixed par time, so a hard board is not punished for being hard. Beating the median is what the Sharp badge tracks, which means the target moves with the field: on a day when everyone struggled, a slow solve can still be a fast one relative to the crowd.

The clue button is not free. The score takes any clues you took into account, and one of the six achievement families, Perfect, exists specifically for solving without one. "Reveal a clue" gives you a definition for one of the lines, which is a large amount of information, and the scorecard remembers that you asked.

The record, the badges and the leagues

Behind the board the game keeps a record: current streak, best streak, fastest time and typical time, plus a solve rate. The launch notes describe it as "a record of your days: streak, best run, fastest and typical times".

There are six families of achievement, and their names tell you what the game values. Sweeper counts puzzles solved. Regular counts days in a row. Sharp counts the times you beat the day's median. Perfect counts solves with no clue taken. Perfect Sharp counts solves that were both fast and clue-free. Champion counts people you brought to the game. The last one is a referral badge, which is a fair hint about how the studio expects the game to grow.

Weekly leagues put you on a table with people you invite. They are the reason the daily board is shared: a league score only means something if everyone solved the same grid on the same day.

Strategy that follows from the mechanics

Generic advice about word games is useless here, because the board is not a word game in the usual sense. It is a constraint problem with a dictionary attached. Everything below comes out of the two rules the game actually enforces: the number counts vowels among eight neighbours, and every unblocked line is a five-letter word.

1. Count a square's neighbours before you read its number

Before a digit means anything you have to know how many squares it is talking about. A square in the middle has eight neighbours. An edge square has five. A corner has three. A square beside a blocked square has fewer than its position suggests, and a corner beside two blocked squares can have as few as one.

So the first pass over any new board is not about vowels at all. It is a pass where you find the squares with the smallest neighbour counts, because those are the squares whose numbers will resolve first. The tutorial's own example is a K showing a three with only three neighbours: that is a corner or a heavily blocked square, and it is a solved square the moment you see it.

2. The two rules that do all the work

For any numbered square, count the flagged neighbours and the unknown neighbours. Two situations resolve immediately.

• If the flags already equal the number, every unknown neighbour is a consonant. Nothing there can be a vowel, so every one of those squares is safe to open.
• If the flags plus the unknown neighbours equal the number, every unknown neighbour is a vowel. Flag them all. You have just solved that square without opening anything.

These two checks are the entire counting engine, and they are worth running mechanically rather than by eye. On a board with ten opened consonants you are running twenty comparisons, and the ones you skip by eye are exactly the ones that were about to resolve.

3. Take the zeros first, and take them in the middle

A zero clears every neighbour. A zero in the centre clears eight squares and hands you eight safe openings, each of which brings its own number. A zero in a corner clears three and changes almost nothing. When you are choosing what to open next and two squares look equally safe, open the one nearer the middle, because the information it returns is worth more.

4. Flag before you open, every time

Opening is irreversible and a vowel ends the run, so the default should be to flag anything you have not proved is a consonant. The flag costs nothing and blocks the square, which is exactly the protection you want. The discipline is to take flags off when the arithmetic disproves them, because a stale flag is a wall you built yourself.

5. When the numbers stall, switch to the word

Numbers stall constantly. A three with three unknown neighbours and no flags is unresolvable by counting, and no amount of staring will change that. That is the signal to change tools: look at the line the square sits on, write down the letters you know, write down the vowel positions you know, and ask what word fits. This is the KICKS step, and it is where most boards are actually won.

The solver on this page does this automatically and shows you the candidate list, which is useful for training the habit. After a dozen boards you start to see the shapes yourself: a line with a known first letter and a vowel in the second position has a much smaller candidate set than it looks.

6. Use what English actually does

Five-letter words are not evenly distributed. We measured the 12,478 five-letter words the solver loads, and the shape of the language is worth knowing when a line is wide open and you have to guess where the vowels are likely to sit.

The second square is a vowel nearly two times in three. The first square is a vowel about one time in eight. That is a real asymmetry and it is the most useful single fact on this page: when a line is open and you have to place a flag speculatively, the second square is by far the best bet and the first square is by far the worst.

The distribution of vowel counts is just as lopsided.

Six words in ten carry exactly two vowels. So once you have proved two vowels in a line, the remaining three squares are probably consonants, and opening them is probably safe. The opposite is also true and more useful: a line where you have proved no vowels at all is very unlikely to be finished, because only 51 words in the whole list have none.

Two more numbers from the same measurement. About 22% of five-letter words contain two vowels side by side, so a pair of adjacent flags is a normal shape and not a warning sign. And 30.5% of five-letter words end in S, while 10% end in Y and 15.6% contain a Y somewhere. Since Y is a consonant in this game, those Y words are the cheap ones: they give you a fifth letter without adding a mine.

7. Work one line at a time

The temptation is to sweep the whole board, opening everything that looks safe. That produces a lot of numbers and very few conclusions, because a half-open line constrains nothing. A finished line is worth more than five half-finished ones: it confirms five letters at once, and each of those letters feeds a number in the crossing direction.

Pick the line with the most known letters and finish it. Then pick the next. The board rewards depth over breadth, which is the opposite of how minesweeper feels.

8. Save the clue for a real stall

The clue is a scored cost, so it is only worth taking when you are genuinely stuck. A good rule is to take it when you have two or more lines with no candidates that you can see and no unresolved number that could still resolve. Before that point the board still has information you have not extracted, and paying for a hint you did not need is the most common way to turn a good solve into an average one.

Mistakes that cost boards

Each of these is a reading error rather than a vocabulary error, and each one ends a board.

Treating Y as a vowel

The game's vowel set is A, E, I, O, U. Y is a consonant, it carries a number, and it is always safe to open. Players who import the Scrabble habit of treating Y as a vowel will flag it, and a flagged Y blocks a consonant you need, which is a slow loss rather than a fast one. It is the most annoying mistake in the game because it does not feel like a mistake at the time.

Counting four neighbours instead of eight

Diagonals count. A number that looks impossible on an orthogonal reading is usually correct on a diagonal one. If a two has only one orthogonal neighbour that could be a vowel, look at the corners before you decide the board is broken.

Reading the number as "hidden squares"

A four does not mean four hidden neighbours. It means four vowels. On a square with eight neighbours and five still hidden, a four is perfectly consistent, and players who read it as a count of hidden squares will conclude the board is contradictory and start guessing.

Flagging and forgetting

Because a flag blocks opening, every speculative flag is a debt. Boards get lost when a player flags six squares early, resolves five of them, and then cannot finish because the sixth is a consonant they cannot open. Naming the vowel when you flag helps, because a named flag reads as a theory rather than a fact, and theories are easier to revisit.

Assuming a blocked line is a word

Rows and columns that contain a blocked square are not words. Trying to force one is pure wasted time, and worse, it can make you doubt a correct letter because the line "does not look like a word". Check for blocked squares before you start searching a line.

Opening to confirm a theory

You think the line is CHART, so you open the square you believe holds the C. If that square turns out to hold a vowel, the run is over, and you have lost a board to confirm something the numbers could have told you. Open only squares you have proved are consonants, and use the word to prove them rather than to test them.

Using the solver without spoiling the board

The tool at the top of this page is deliberately built to stop where the board stops. It will not guess a letter that the board does not determine, and it will not fill a square just because one word would be convenient. Everything it reports comes from one of two places: the arithmetic on a number, or the complete set of dictionary words that fit a line.

That has a practical consequence. If you enter a position and the tool reports that a line has no word that fits, you have almost certainly mistyped something: a letter in the wrong square, a number that belongs to a different square, or a flag on a consonant. The tool checks its own conclusions and tells you when the position is impossible rather than quietly producing nonsense.

The other consequence is a caveat worth stating plainly. The candidate lists come from our dictionary, which is broad: it carries inflections, archaic spellings and borrowed words. We could not find a published word list for the game, so a line that our list resolves to one word might have a second answer in the game's own list, and a line that our list cannot resolve at all might be resolvable with a word we do not carry. When the tool says "only PRINT fits", read it as "only PRINT fits in this dictionary", and treat the reason as a strong hint rather than a proof.

The best way to use it is after the fact. Play the board yourself, write down what you concluded, then enter the position and compare. The gap between your deductions and the tool's is the exact list of things to work on, and it is a much better use of the tool than letting it play the board for you.

Where this fits on AnyWordSolver

Vowel Sweeper sits at an odd angle to the rest of the puzzles here, because it is half logic and half vocabulary. If you want the vocabulary half on its own, the word finder takes a pattern and a letter set and returns matching words, which is the same search this page runs against a line. If you have a rack rather than a grid, the unscramble letters tool is the faster one.

For the logic half, the closest relative on the site is the nonogram solver, which is also a grid of numbers that has to be read as constraints rather than as counts of hidden things. The Letter Boxed solver is the other crossword-adjacent tool, and it makes an interesting contrast: it also works a small grid of letters, but its rule is about not reusing a square, while this game's rule is about not touching a vowel.

If what you actually want is more five-letter vocabulary, the five-letter word list is drawn from the same dictionary this solver searches, organised by starting letter and ending. And if you are working through the whole shelf of daily puzzles, the word games hub has the rest of them in one place, including the Boggle solver and the Spelling Bee word list.